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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Thoughts from Bishop Jake

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Dear Sisters and
Brothers,

This week's thought
is a little longer than usual. It is the talk "Faith and Miracles" that I gave
at Grace, Monroe, yesterday and will give later this evening at St. Mark's
Cathedral, Shreveport. I will be posting it at Pelican Anglican as well. I hope
you find it fruitful reading and, as always, enjoy hearing your
response.

If you want to know
what somebody believes, just watch them for a while. We all exhibit patterns of
behavior in our ordinary lives.

We are either routinely
generous or miserly, bold or timid, trusting or suspicious. We readily welcome
strangers or keep them at a distance, let go of grievances or nurse grudges,
respond to the needs of others or pursue our own comfort.

In other words,
believing--really believing--is doing.

The philosopher William
James taught that your faith is composed of the beliefs that you stake your life
on. He doesn't mean by this ideas that you'll die for or fight over. Instead,
faith is that set of beliefs embodied in our habitual, nearly automatic daily
living.

Take gravity, for
instance. I never really think about gravity, but with each step I take I
reaffirm my belief in it. I never hesitate to take the next step for fear that
I'll float away, and I will certainly not climb a steeple expecting to fly back
down by flapping my arms.

Few of us really follow
Jesus with this kind of fidelity. But we want to. Faith is something we grow
into, mature in, stumble over, slip from, and try again. Jesus is Emmanuel, God
with us. And following Jesus means taking each new step with the confidence that
he is with us.

He guides our actions,
guards our hearts, and redeems our missteps. That's what we say we believe. We
mean it when we forgive those who hurt us, share whatever we have with those who
have less than we do, and find our Savior in the faces of people very unlike us.
Gospel faith is something we do sometimes and seek to do always.

Many people point to
Jesus' miracles as evidence for faith. For instance, John's Gospel recounts
Jesus' healing of a man born blind. (John 9:1-41) Some are keen to say that this
demonstrates that God gets involved. He is no absentee parent. He's involved up
to his elbows in the messiness of our lives.

There's just one
problem: how we understand miracles. The way we think about miracles actually
leads us to treat God as an occasional visitor at best and at worst as a
capricious intruder. Many of us don't get miracles, so using our misconceptions
about miracles to shape our daily lives has the ironic effect turning our hearts
away from God.

By contrast, getting
our minds around a sound view of miracles can help us to grow in faith, to shape
our daily lives in a way that resonates with our belief in Jesus, in the God who
is truly involved.

So, let's take a look
at three related questions:

What is our common misconception about miracles?

How does this misconception distort our faith?

What is a miracle?

Supernatural
Intrusions
Many of us think of
miracles as supernatural intrusions. Disruptions of the natural order. See if
this sounds familiar.

Since the rise of
modern natural science, we have been taught to think of the universe as a kind
of closed system. Anything that happens in nature is explained with reference to
other natural phenomena as a function of natural law.

If a blind man recovers
his sight, if a woman with an issue of blood gets relief, or if a lame person
suddenly walks there must be a natural explanation.

Given that assumption,
we've come to think of miracles as disruptions of the natural order from beyond
nature, from the supernatural realm of God. Miracles, in other words, seem like
special exceptions to the usual rules for how things operate. God is stepping in
when he usually keeps a hands off posture.

So, the blind man in
John's Gospel received special, remarkable attention to his his condition. God
chose to relieve his suffering and altered the natural course of things to
accomplish it. And that leads us to the problem of miracles so long as we think
of them in this way.

The Problem
of Miracles
This view of miracles leads
inevitably to the familiar question about God's reasons for stepping in at some
points and refusing to do so at other points.

We wonder why he saved
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace but allowed six million
Jews to burn in the ovens of concentration camps.

Why did the old stinker
recover from cancer and the innocent child succumb?

Viewing miracles as
supernatural intrusions can make God seem capricious and downright unfair.
Philosophers and theologians have filled library shelves with attempts to
reconcile God's goodness with the existence of suffering and his apparently
sporadic interventions to relieve it.

I am not interested so
much in untying this intellectual knot as identifying and dispelling the
negative practical implications of thinking about miracles as supernatural
intrusions in the first place.

The practical problem
of miracles is the way in which our belief in them shapes our daily living. When
we think about miracles as so occasional and capricious as to be random, we
begin to act as if God is simply indifferent and unreliable.

We might not say
anything of the sort. In fact, we may readily recite the Creed and repeat the
Lord's Prayer. Nevertheless, our actions begin to fall into patterns that
reflect the conviction that we are more or less on our own.

A friend of mine put it
this way when I asked her if she trusts God. "It's fine to trust the Lord, but
you better hitch the mule up to the plow." In other words, getting God's help
with something would be a lagniappe. But she's not counting on it.

Guess what. She's
remarkably controlling, prone to anger, and bears fierce grudges. Even with a
clerical collar around her neck.

Our common
misconception about miracles has had a negative impact on her faith, as it can
on anyone else's faith.

So what am I
suggesting? Forgetting about miracles altogether? Nothing could be further from
the truth. Instead, let's think more clearly about miracles as a means to
strengthen our faith.

Ruin and
Restoration
For starters, let's stop
thinking about miracles as supernatural intrusions by rejecting the idea of
nature as a closed system. Scripture teaches us that God is sovereign. All
things move in accordance with his will.

Natural law is not
something separate from God that excludes his habitual and reliable intervention
in our lives. Instead, natural law describes the orderly way that God chooses to
reign over his creation. He sets the planets in their courses and stirs the
tides.

Now this might seem to
lead us into a difficult problem. Terrible suffering occurs every day as a
result of natural occurrences. Are we to think that God purposely crushes people
with earthquakes and drowns people in floods and starves people in
famines?

Not at all!

And we can see this
clearly when we remember that we dwell in a fallen creation. The story of Adam
and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eve teaches us that the creation is
fractured. God intended a gracious and peaceful order for all things. And he
still does. However, his creative, providential work takes the form of restoring
his ruined creation. Restoring us.

The cross and the empty
tomb restore the ruined creation. On the cross, God involves himself in all the
worst we have to offer and transforms it from ruin into new life.

The creation in which
we dwell is a work in progress, and God is at work constantly and
perpetually.

Miracles give us a
clear glimpse of what God is up to all the time. The sovereign God is restoring
his ruined creation through every step we take in his name. Our routine acts of
mercy and grace--even the smallest and apparently least significant--are the
channel for God's restoration of this ruined universe. Miracles simply show us
in gaudy outline what God is doing through ordinary hands and feet every
day.

Faith, real faith, is
daring to take the next step confident that God is restoring this ruined
universe in that very step.